Therefore a Cruel Messenger
A Novel of Chi-Town
by Liam the Genius liam72975@aol.com
1
It was New Years' Eve and it was snowing like crazy. Usually New Years was a night loud with singing, shouts and cries of revelry, but the snow seemed to eat the noise right up. The Tent Town dispatch station experienced the coming of the year 105 P.A. as a quiet sonata of distant, drunken hurrahs and auld lang syne's, along with whizzing of the occasional SAMAS overhead, going by on patrol.
Midnight came and went innocuously, innocently. The clock counted off the minutes, 12:01, 12:02, 12:03. The people of the Burbs were singing and taking drinks and toasting each other; blowing off noisemakers, stealing kisses and making promises; hugging and clapping and telling themselves how this year was going to be different. No more meanness, no more stupidity. A straight life from here on in. Turn over a new leaf. Get a fresh start. Get citizenship. Get the hell out of the Burbs.
By a quarter after, all the inhabitants of the Chi-Town Burbs had settled back down to business as usual: first an assault out by the canal. Vibro- blade, partial dismemberment. A drunk on a hover-cycle plowed into a shack, leveling the place. Nobody home, no fatalities. The drunk shredded by cracked plastic paneling. Disfigured, crippled. He'd live.
Calls trickled in after that. Two cut'n'run artists nail some halfborg for his shiny new arm, leaving him in an alley leaking blood and hydraulic fluid. Then: juicers brawling like wild animals down near the Tent Town garbage dump, beating several passers-by-a lone woman and a trio of brothers-to a bloody featureless pulp. Then: a man's energy pistol, concealed in his trousers, accidentally went off; his entire left leg vaporized below the hip.
Most frighteningly, a man reports seeing bright flashing lights and smelling "sulfur and brimstone" coming from his neighbor's house. He hears screams. He thinks: rift. He calls for help.
Crying rift is no small matter: three minutes later a contingent of RCSG scientists and canine PSInet snoops are on the scene, backed up by a squad of infantry grunts in new Deadboy armor, a ponderous and impassive ambulatory tank of a "No-Neck" Mauler with guns at the ready, and a pair of hardcase NTSET commandos who seemed to pop out of nowhere, like rodents.
The house is charred, smells of smoke and cooked meat. The Psi's sense nothing. Officers kick the door of the dwelling off its hinges. Inside: no rift, no demons. Just sparks and ashes. A cache of illegal fireworks and the corpses of the homeowner's two children, burnt to charcoal. One boy, one girl. Tentative ages pending postmortem: three and seven. The mother is apprehended as she returns home from a party, heavily intoxicated.
Questions of jurisdiction arise when the ISS Inspectors from Chi-Town swoop in, wanting to take the homeowner into their own custody. The Chi-Town boys cold shoulder the Burbs Peacemakers; ransack the charred hovel; discover: the woman owned literature of a historical and academic nature. Contraband. They think she should be given a public trial; that it would make good propaganda: the typical, irresponsible Burbs single parent, filling herself with booze and illegal information as her children burn to death back home. It would make a damn good poster.
The Burbs ISS Peacemakers complain bitterly, but they are outranked and outclassed-the Specters of Chi-Town are much more prestigious than their lowly Burbs counterparts. They throw their weight around with impunity. Chi- Town talks, the Burbs listen. That's the way it works. In the end, the Burbs Peacemakers release the mother from their custody. She goes to Chi- Town to be sentenced and stand trial. All present know she will be convicted and executed before week's end. The Burbs Peacemakers act like it was their choice.
Peacemaker Buddy Powell alone at the Tent Town dispatch station, listening to the ISS shortwave, the rest of the force all out on double- duty holiday patrol. He took advantage of the privacy to haul out his digital vid-textbooks. With the station emptied, he could study them without taking any of the usual crap from his fellow Burbs officers:
"Are you studying for the Inspector exams, Peacemaker Powell? Do you think they're going to take a Burb-scrubber like you in Chi-Town ISS? Maybe if you get a perfect score they'll let you roust bummed-out crash-heads way down on Level 4. Maybe they'll let you mop the puke out of the drunk tank. These are the Burbs, Peacemaker Powell. This is the shit end of the stick."
An old Burbs Specter laid it out for him, tried to explain it compassionately: "The only way to leave Burbs ISS is to get carried out, Powell. No one gets promoted out."
Powell thought that his fellow officers had no ambition. There were some Specters on the Burbs force but they were old and cynical; just marking time until their pensions kicked in. They hadn't been promoted from the Burbs, but demoted from Chi-Town. Drunks, nutcases, most of them. Or just plain incompetent.
As for the Burbs Peacemakers, they didn't even register to take the Inspector exams while, in Chi-Town, men half their age were already Inspectors and intelligence operatives and decorated brass. The career fatalism in Burbs ISS was palpable, except with Buddy Powell, and that marked him as an outsider, an idealist, a cherry. A sucker. At twenty- seven, he had already risen as far as he could go as a Peacemaker, commanding men old enough to be his father. He wanted more. He was capable of more.
He flicked the first vid on. The title: Comparative Humanoid Bloodstain Analysis. Holographic images of walls and clothes smeared with crimson fluid leaped to life before his eyes. He took out his fiber-optic light pen and moved methodically from chapter to chapter. He analyzed vectors, directionality, stippling, misting, ghosting, spining, splashing, coagulation, drip effects, arterial spurts, capillary action, stain ellipsis, satellite spatter. He ran spreadsheets of evaporation factors, of viscosity-over-time comparisons between the common humanoid types, of DNA differences between terrestrial and extraterrestrial species. His head swam in criminal-science terminology and mathematical formulae. There were six other vids in his desk: crime scene investigation, interrogation, surveillance, evidence-preservation, forensic pathology. He had read them all. His co-workers thought him both naïve and boringly bookish. Powell didn't care.
He was set for the tests, he was ready. He could close his eyes and write those textbooks. Compulsively, he kept on studying, underlining, highlighting. Memorizing.
He held off the futility he knew was there, around the edges of the page. The tests would only take him so far. He knew this. There had to be more. There had to be a miracle.
He had the volume on the vid turned way up, listening for the fifteenth time to a distinguished Chi-Town ISS pathologist discussing the finer points of the human circulatory system versus that of various common D-Bee species.
"Uhm.ah.sir." the man behind Powell cleared his throat. It was a rookie Peacekeeper under Powell's command. Only a few days out of the academy. He looked sick. Powell almost fell over himself shutting down the vid, sliding it back into his drawer as if it were an illegal novel. He turned to face the young man shaking in his body armor.
"Sir, I.sir." the man stammered. Shaking very badly. Powell wondered if the man was on drugs. "It's horrible.all turned inside out.a man."
Homicide was beyond his authority. He looked around the dispatch station. It was completely, utterly empty. Not a soul. It was his call, had to be his.
"Where?" he said, already strapping and locking his helmet onto his head, slinging his laser rifle over his shoulder.
"Out.on the west side, where Tent Town meets Scab Town. Down where those contaminated wells are."
Powell nodded. "Put a call out to the scene. No one goes anywhere. No one touches anything. No one does anything. Tell them that this one's mine." He started thinking of ways to justify this to his superiors in the morning.
Powell locked his desk drawer and left the rookie at the dispatch station without a backward glance.
"And mind the radio."
* * *
Powell ran all the way; still too late. The spot: a secluded ditch near a pair of radioactive wells. The crime scene: tramped to slush by the boots of his 40-year-old subordinates, not looking at the corpse, not even trying to gather evidence. Helmets up, winking at female passers-by. Any footprints or tracks or useful bits of information trodden into the wet ground. He would have to poke around in the cold mud, then.
Peacemaker Gottlieb said to Powell as he walked up: "I've been doing this eighteen years, and I seen some disgusting shit, but." He spat.
Powell looked at the corpse and the sight hit him like a sledgehammer. His guts went watery. He understood why his men were trying to look elsewhere. It took all his reserves of professionalism to continue: he crouched, put his face close to the lacerated gore. He tried to see the scene as a vid-textbook, not as a mangled man. It wasn't a person, it was homework.
Powell breathed slowly and evenly to control his nausea. He jacked up two portable light sources. He got started.
Speaking into his personal recorder: "2:32 am. First Tent Town homicide, January 1, 105 P.A. Subject unclothed, appears caucasian male. Age.difficult to assess. I'm going to say early twenties. Roughly six feet tall. Probably killed elsewhere. Only a light dusting of ice crystals despite heavy snowfall. No melted snow or icy runoff on the corpse. It had time to cool before being dumped here. Preliminary estimation of time of death: late this afternoon. Distinctive tracks-" Powell looked at the trampled snow and glared at his subordinates, "-have been obliterated and impossible to recover. The face is extremely discolored and swollen."
"No kidding," said Gottlieb, grinning. "His head's the size of a watermelon. That's what they call in Chi-Town a 'very pertinent observation.' Over here, it's a no-brainer. They letting you sweep homicides now, Peacemaker Powell?"
Ignoring the interruption, Powell went on: "Subject likely received a massive beating in his final hours. Hair: brown. Eyes." Powell lifted a swollen eyelid with the tip of a metal pointer. "Eyes: unclear. Apparently gouged to pulp. Damp, blackish object protruding from mouth-possibly tongue. If so, very large and swollen. Skin has been cut open and pulled back over large areas of muscle tissue on extremities. Organs seem to have been removed through large incision in abdomen and.piled on chest. After death probably, there's not much blood. Much of the subject's lower torso is exposed cavity. The incisions are clean. There are multiple old and new heat trauma marks on lower torso, groin area and genitals. They appear to be the scars and blisters of old and new burns. His scrotum."
Gottlieb again, pointing across the ditch: "I think that's it over there. Part of it, at least." Powell collected it in a baggie, continued.
"There is.a small metallic computer chip on the surface of the exposed viscera." Powell examined it closely, wondered what it was. On a hunch, he lifted up the head of the corpse. "And there is IC bar-coding on the back of the neck. I don't have a scanner with me, but I'm going to assume that subject was psychic, and metallic chip was for ID coding purposes." Powell lifted the small metal dot from the twisted slop of organ tissue and bottled it.
"Aww.now that just turns my stomach."
Buddy Powell looked up at Gottleib, followed the man's line of sight. Down the alley, passing under the flickering yellow glow of a streetlight torch, there was a couple walking together, stumbling home, drunk, feeling romantic, holding each other tightly. The female: a buxom thirtyish brunette in a chunky wool and plastic snowsuit with a tattoo on her forehead, faded blue, of three interlocked circles-some sort of old gang symbol. She was pretty. The male: short, furry, barely clothed, clearly not human. A d-bee. It had the suggestion of a canine snout, but wasn't any sort of dog boy or anything. In the dim light, it was hard to tell what it was.
Whatever it is, Powell thought, It must be pretty drunk to be openly wandering the streets, and in the arms of a human woman, no less.
Powell heard the quiet thrum of a neural mace unholstered, saw Gottleib start down the alley towards the wobbling pair, blood about to be spilled.
"Gottleib. Leave it."
"C'mon, Powell," Gottleib slowed but didn't stop, "Isn't that disgusting?"
"It's too disgusting to think about," said Powell. "But right now your job is not to regulate what's disgusting. Come back over here into the light. That's an order."
Gottleib grudgingly holstered his neural mace and returned to the ditch.
"So whad d'ya think?" said Hentoff, the short swarthy kid who was Gottlieb's partner. "Juicer, street gang? Wolfen? Demon?"
Hentoff slurred his words around a wad of gum the size of a handball. Powell noticed that all his men were chewing gum furiously. He leaned over and sniffed.
"Is that alcohol on your breath?"
Gottlieb said: "Powell. It's New Years." Flatly. Neither denial nor apology. It made Powell furious. He put them all to work, assigned them to interview the people who lived on the surrounding streets. All eighteen hundred of them.
His men cursed him to his face. They did as they were told.
* * *
The sun was cracking egg-yellow over the horizon and the Burbs people, at the end of their celebratory tether, were dropping like flies. There were some after-parties, all-nighters going for hair of the dog in a big way, hard core dopers dropping speed and crash to keep on going and going and going, but most people were stumbling home to sleep it off, or just passing out in the gray slush.
Powell carefully bagged the corpse and put it on a porta-stretcher, called the med station for a body pickup. The med dispatch sounded drunk, refused to address Powell using proper protocol. He took the man's name to file a complaint when the next shift came on. He already had six other names on the list.
He took three dozen photographs of the corpse in its surroundings, of the streets, the houses, the line of sight from the nearby pedways to the ditch. He got down to examining the scene.
The ditch was full of garbage and its slopes had been stomped to mud soup by his men. He raked the slop with his gauntlet, slowly, looking for anything out of the ordinary. To start with he got weeds and dead grass and matchbooks and shell-casings and cigarette butts and drug baggies and false teeth and murderthon betting slips and d-bee porno and week-old rubbers and razor blades and a child's patchwork doll. The more he scraped, the more he found. It all looked old, all looked useless. He took it all, just in case. He used up all the evidence bags he had, then started putting stuff in his pockets. There was too much. Unprofessional in the extreme, but a reasonable compromise under the circumstances.
Three hours later, the meat wagon still hadn't shown up. He had been squatting over the ditch the entire time. His eyes were feeling strained and dry from the long hours of staring and concentration. His back and neck were screaming from having to hold the same crouch for so long. He straightened up, tried to work the kinks out. Powell radioed the med station again. This time there wasn't even an answer. He hoped the dispatch had collapsed in a corner somewhere and choked on his own vomit. The snow had stopped and the sun was shining down from a cloudless sky on glistening Chi-Town and the rotten, wet Burbs. Powell took off his gauntlet and felt the dull black plastic of the body bag. The air was cold, but the bag was hot. Sucking up all that sunlight, raising the corpse's temperature degree by degree, accelerating tissue decay. He needed to get the body to a freezer, fast. He picked up the stretcher and, balancing one end on an anti- grav sphere and the other on the shoulder-plate of his Dead Boy armor, humped it two miles to the med station on his own, walking double-time the whole way.
The place was virtually empty. Coroner nowhere in sight, dispatch snoring at the radio, hung-over med tech puking his guts out in the john. The intake man was semi-conscious, cradling a jug of homemade whiskey in his fat hairy arms, singing incoherently. Powell walked right in with the body, unchallenged. Walked right into examination room one, did the paperwork himself. Left the receiving signature blank.
Unzipping the bag, he had an irresistible impulse: Forget these sloppy drunks, I'm doing this one.
He had neither the skills nor the legal authority to autopsy anyone, much less a murder victim, but he was observant and he was sober, two things that no one else in the building could claim. Until now, he'd worked administration-assigning schedules, calculating overtime, spell-checking logs and daybooks-while his officers, incompetent old-timer ex-Specters, lied and boozed, shirked fieldwork and ignored cases. He knew how they saw this: just another sack of flesh on the slab. Just another killing. Just another dead Burbs scumbag. Nothing special. Seen one, seen em all.
Powell looked down at the mangled body. He'd never handled homicide before. That was a Specter crime-not for Peacemaker investigation. But Powell had been in the Burbs long enough to know their drill: ask a few questions, break a few heads. Maybe railroad a psychic or d-bee sympathizer, get credit on their record for a solved case, a pat on the back, a nice cred bonus. In the end, they would achieve nothing. They would find no justice for the poor bastard on examination table 1. And Powell would still be working dispatch radio down in the Burbs.
No, he thought. This is my body. I can do this.
Hello miracle, hello ticket to Chi-Town.
He had at first been sickened. Now he felt drawn. Standing there, he couldn't take his eyes off it, off of the hills and valleys and little neighborhoods of exposed organs, the culs-de-sac of glistening cavities, the hidden monuments of yellowy gristle and bone. He wanted to explore it like a map of unknown territory.
And who cared if it was a psychic? Some people did. Powell certainly didn't.
This one was his. It had to be, had to be. He caught it, he'd finish it. Somehow he'd stay on the case, somehow. There had to be a way. The Inspector exams were coming up-he'd ace them, but he knew he needed something else, something more. He knew what he had to do. Make a case. Nail the perp. Be a hero. Get justice. Get promoted. Get the hell out of the Burbs.
Through the window and over the building-tops it was still dark enough to watch the predawn sky being carved up by blue-white searchlight beams on the gun turrets ringing the upper security halo of the city. In the Coalition med station, on the west side of the Burbs, the massive walled metropolis of Chi-Town would eclipse the sun when it rose.
Powell shut the door quietly. The lock pipped closed. The instrument drawer with its jumble of dangerous honed chrome was already unlocked. He turned on his personal recorder and began a preliminary autopsy.
A Novel of Chi-Town
by Liam the Genius liam72975@aol.com
1
It was New Years' Eve and it was snowing like crazy. Usually New Years was a night loud with singing, shouts and cries of revelry, but the snow seemed to eat the noise right up. The Tent Town dispatch station experienced the coming of the year 105 P.A. as a quiet sonata of distant, drunken hurrahs and auld lang syne's, along with whizzing of the occasional SAMAS overhead, going by on patrol.
Midnight came and went innocuously, innocently. The clock counted off the minutes, 12:01, 12:02, 12:03. The people of the Burbs were singing and taking drinks and toasting each other; blowing off noisemakers, stealing kisses and making promises; hugging and clapping and telling themselves how this year was going to be different. No more meanness, no more stupidity. A straight life from here on in. Turn over a new leaf. Get a fresh start. Get citizenship. Get the hell out of the Burbs.
By a quarter after, all the inhabitants of the Chi-Town Burbs had settled back down to business as usual: first an assault out by the canal. Vibro- blade, partial dismemberment. A drunk on a hover-cycle plowed into a shack, leveling the place. Nobody home, no fatalities. The drunk shredded by cracked plastic paneling. Disfigured, crippled. He'd live.
Calls trickled in after that. Two cut'n'run artists nail some halfborg for his shiny new arm, leaving him in an alley leaking blood and hydraulic fluid. Then: juicers brawling like wild animals down near the Tent Town garbage dump, beating several passers-by-a lone woman and a trio of brothers-to a bloody featureless pulp. Then: a man's energy pistol, concealed in his trousers, accidentally went off; his entire left leg vaporized below the hip.
Most frighteningly, a man reports seeing bright flashing lights and smelling "sulfur and brimstone" coming from his neighbor's house. He hears screams. He thinks: rift. He calls for help.
Crying rift is no small matter: three minutes later a contingent of RCSG scientists and canine PSInet snoops are on the scene, backed up by a squad of infantry grunts in new Deadboy armor, a ponderous and impassive ambulatory tank of a "No-Neck" Mauler with guns at the ready, and a pair of hardcase NTSET commandos who seemed to pop out of nowhere, like rodents.
The house is charred, smells of smoke and cooked meat. The Psi's sense nothing. Officers kick the door of the dwelling off its hinges. Inside: no rift, no demons. Just sparks and ashes. A cache of illegal fireworks and the corpses of the homeowner's two children, burnt to charcoal. One boy, one girl. Tentative ages pending postmortem: three and seven. The mother is apprehended as she returns home from a party, heavily intoxicated.
Questions of jurisdiction arise when the ISS Inspectors from Chi-Town swoop in, wanting to take the homeowner into their own custody. The Chi-Town boys cold shoulder the Burbs Peacemakers; ransack the charred hovel; discover: the woman owned literature of a historical and academic nature. Contraband. They think she should be given a public trial; that it would make good propaganda: the typical, irresponsible Burbs single parent, filling herself with booze and illegal information as her children burn to death back home. It would make a damn good poster.
The Burbs ISS Peacemakers complain bitterly, but they are outranked and outclassed-the Specters of Chi-Town are much more prestigious than their lowly Burbs counterparts. They throw their weight around with impunity. Chi- Town talks, the Burbs listen. That's the way it works. In the end, the Burbs Peacemakers release the mother from their custody. She goes to Chi- Town to be sentenced and stand trial. All present know she will be convicted and executed before week's end. The Burbs Peacemakers act like it was their choice.
Peacemaker Buddy Powell alone at the Tent Town dispatch station, listening to the ISS shortwave, the rest of the force all out on double- duty holiday patrol. He took advantage of the privacy to haul out his digital vid-textbooks. With the station emptied, he could study them without taking any of the usual crap from his fellow Burbs officers:
"Are you studying for the Inspector exams, Peacemaker Powell? Do you think they're going to take a Burb-scrubber like you in Chi-Town ISS? Maybe if you get a perfect score they'll let you roust bummed-out crash-heads way down on Level 4. Maybe they'll let you mop the puke out of the drunk tank. These are the Burbs, Peacemaker Powell. This is the shit end of the stick."
An old Burbs Specter laid it out for him, tried to explain it compassionately: "The only way to leave Burbs ISS is to get carried out, Powell. No one gets promoted out."
Powell thought that his fellow officers had no ambition. There were some Specters on the Burbs force but they were old and cynical; just marking time until their pensions kicked in. They hadn't been promoted from the Burbs, but demoted from Chi-Town. Drunks, nutcases, most of them. Or just plain incompetent.
As for the Burbs Peacemakers, they didn't even register to take the Inspector exams while, in Chi-Town, men half their age were already Inspectors and intelligence operatives and decorated brass. The career fatalism in Burbs ISS was palpable, except with Buddy Powell, and that marked him as an outsider, an idealist, a cherry. A sucker. At twenty- seven, he had already risen as far as he could go as a Peacemaker, commanding men old enough to be his father. He wanted more. He was capable of more.
He flicked the first vid on. The title: Comparative Humanoid Bloodstain Analysis. Holographic images of walls and clothes smeared with crimson fluid leaped to life before his eyes. He took out his fiber-optic light pen and moved methodically from chapter to chapter. He analyzed vectors, directionality, stippling, misting, ghosting, spining, splashing, coagulation, drip effects, arterial spurts, capillary action, stain ellipsis, satellite spatter. He ran spreadsheets of evaporation factors, of viscosity-over-time comparisons between the common humanoid types, of DNA differences between terrestrial and extraterrestrial species. His head swam in criminal-science terminology and mathematical formulae. There were six other vids in his desk: crime scene investigation, interrogation, surveillance, evidence-preservation, forensic pathology. He had read them all. His co-workers thought him both naïve and boringly bookish. Powell didn't care.
He was set for the tests, he was ready. He could close his eyes and write those textbooks. Compulsively, he kept on studying, underlining, highlighting. Memorizing.
He held off the futility he knew was there, around the edges of the page. The tests would only take him so far. He knew this. There had to be more. There had to be a miracle.
He had the volume on the vid turned way up, listening for the fifteenth time to a distinguished Chi-Town ISS pathologist discussing the finer points of the human circulatory system versus that of various common D-Bee species.
"Uhm.ah.sir." the man behind Powell cleared his throat. It was a rookie Peacekeeper under Powell's command. Only a few days out of the academy. He looked sick. Powell almost fell over himself shutting down the vid, sliding it back into his drawer as if it were an illegal novel. He turned to face the young man shaking in his body armor.
"Sir, I.sir." the man stammered. Shaking very badly. Powell wondered if the man was on drugs. "It's horrible.all turned inside out.a man."
Homicide was beyond his authority. He looked around the dispatch station. It was completely, utterly empty. Not a soul. It was his call, had to be his.
"Where?" he said, already strapping and locking his helmet onto his head, slinging his laser rifle over his shoulder.
"Out.on the west side, where Tent Town meets Scab Town. Down where those contaminated wells are."
Powell nodded. "Put a call out to the scene. No one goes anywhere. No one touches anything. No one does anything. Tell them that this one's mine." He started thinking of ways to justify this to his superiors in the morning.
Powell locked his desk drawer and left the rookie at the dispatch station without a backward glance.
"And mind the radio."
* * *
Powell ran all the way; still too late. The spot: a secluded ditch near a pair of radioactive wells. The crime scene: tramped to slush by the boots of his 40-year-old subordinates, not looking at the corpse, not even trying to gather evidence. Helmets up, winking at female passers-by. Any footprints or tracks or useful bits of information trodden into the wet ground. He would have to poke around in the cold mud, then.
Peacemaker Gottlieb said to Powell as he walked up: "I've been doing this eighteen years, and I seen some disgusting shit, but." He spat.
Powell looked at the corpse and the sight hit him like a sledgehammer. His guts went watery. He understood why his men were trying to look elsewhere. It took all his reserves of professionalism to continue: he crouched, put his face close to the lacerated gore. He tried to see the scene as a vid-textbook, not as a mangled man. It wasn't a person, it was homework.
Powell breathed slowly and evenly to control his nausea. He jacked up two portable light sources. He got started.
Speaking into his personal recorder: "2:32 am. First Tent Town homicide, January 1, 105 P.A. Subject unclothed, appears caucasian male. Age.difficult to assess. I'm going to say early twenties. Roughly six feet tall. Probably killed elsewhere. Only a light dusting of ice crystals despite heavy snowfall. No melted snow or icy runoff on the corpse. It had time to cool before being dumped here. Preliminary estimation of time of death: late this afternoon. Distinctive tracks-" Powell looked at the trampled snow and glared at his subordinates, "-have been obliterated and impossible to recover. The face is extremely discolored and swollen."
"No kidding," said Gottlieb, grinning. "His head's the size of a watermelon. That's what they call in Chi-Town a 'very pertinent observation.' Over here, it's a no-brainer. They letting you sweep homicides now, Peacemaker Powell?"
Ignoring the interruption, Powell went on: "Subject likely received a massive beating in his final hours. Hair: brown. Eyes." Powell lifted a swollen eyelid with the tip of a metal pointer. "Eyes: unclear. Apparently gouged to pulp. Damp, blackish object protruding from mouth-possibly tongue. If so, very large and swollen. Skin has been cut open and pulled back over large areas of muscle tissue on extremities. Organs seem to have been removed through large incision in abdomen and.piled on chest. After death probably, there's not much blood. Much of the subject's lower torso is exposed cavity. The incisions are clean. There are multiple old and new heat trauma marks on lower torso, groin area and genitals. They appear to be the scars and blisters of old and new burns. His scrotum."
Gottlieb again, pointing across the ditch: "I think that's it over there. Part of it, at least." Powell collected it in a baggie, continued.
"There is.a small metallic computer chip on the surface of the exposed viscera." Powell examined it closely, wondered what it was. On a hunch, he lifted up the head of the corpse. "And there is IC bar-coding on the back of the neck. I don't have a scanner with me, but I'm going to assume that subject was psychic, and metallic chip was for ID coding purposes." Powell lifted the small metal dot from the twisted slop of organ tissue and bottled it.
"Aww.now that just turns my stomach."
Buddy Powell looked up at Gottleib, followed the man's line of sight. Down the alley, passing under the flickering yellow glow of a streetlight torch, there was a couple walking together, stumbling home, drunk, feeling romantic, holding each other tightly. The female: a buxom thirtyish brunette in a chunky wool and plastic snowsuit with a tattoo on her forehead, faded blue, of three interlocked circles-some sort of old gang symbol. She was pretty. The male: short, furry, barely clothed, clearly not human. A d-bee. It had the suggestion of a canine snout, but wasn't any sort of dog boy or anything. In the dim light, it was hard to tell what it was.
Whatever it is, Powell thought, It must be pretty drunk to be openly wandering the streets, and in the arms of a human woman, no less.
Powell heard the quiet thrum of a neural mace unholstered, saw Gottleib start down the alley towards the wobbling pair, blood about to be spilled.
"Gottleib. Leave it."
"C'mon, Powell," Gottleib slowed but didn't stop, "Isn't that disgusting?"
"It's too disgusting to think about," said Powell. "But right now your job is not to regulate what's disgusting. Come back over here into the light. That's an order."
Gottleib grudgingly holstered his neural mace and returned to the ditch.
"So whad d'ya think?" said Hentoff, the short swarthy kid who was Gottlieb's partner. "Juicer, street gang? Wolfen? Demon?"
Hentoff slurred his words around a wad of gum the size of a handball. Powell noticed that all his men were chewing gum furiously. He leaned over and sniffed.
"Is that alcohol on your breath?"
Gottlieb said: "Powell. It's New Years." Flatly. Neither denial nor apology. It made Powell furious. He put them all to work, assigned them to interview the people who lived on the surrounding streets. All eighteen hundred of them.
His men cursed him to his face. They did as they were told.
* * *
The sun was cracking egg-yellow over the horizon and the Burbs people, at the end of their celebratory tether, were dropping like flies. There were some after-parties, all-nighters going for hair of the dog in a big way, hard core dopers dropping speed and crash to keep on going and going and going, but most people were stumbling home to sleep it off, or just passing out in the gray slush.
Powell carefully bagged the corpse and put it on a porta-stretcher, called the med station for a body pickup. The med dispatch sounded drunk, refused to address Powell using proper protocol. He took the man's name to file a complaint when the next shift came on. He already had six other names on the list.
He took three dozen photographs of the corpse in its surroundings, of the streets, the houses, the line of sight from the nearby pedways to the ditch. He got down to examining the scene.
The ditch was full of garbage and its slopes had been stomped to mud soup by his men. He raked the slop with his gauntlet, slowly, looking for anything out of the ordinary. To start with he got weeds and dead grass and matchbooks and shell-casings and cigarette butts and drug baggies and false teeth and murderthon betting slips and d-bee porno and week-old rubbers and razor blades and a child's patchwork doll. The more he scraped, the more he found. It all looked old, all looked useless. He took it all, just in case. He used up all the evidence bags he had, then started putting stuff in his pockets. There was too much. Unprofessional in the extreme, but a reasonable compromise under the circumstances.
Three hours later, the meat wagon still hadn't shown up. He had been squatting over the ditch the entire time. His eyes were feeling strained and dry from the long hours of staring and concentration. His back and neck were screaming from having to hold the same crouch for so long. He straightened up, tried to work the kinks out. Powell radioed the med station again. This time there wasn't even an answer. He hoped the dispatch had collapsed in a corner somewhere and choked on his own vomit. The snow had stopped and the sun was shining down from a cloudless sky on glistening Chi-Town and the rotten, wet Burbs. Powell took off his gauntlet and felt the dull black plastic of the body bag. The air was cold, but the bag was hot. Sucking up all that sunlight, raising the corpse's temperature degree by degree, accelerating tissue decay. He needed to get the body to a freezer, fast. He picked up the stretcher and, balancing one end on an anti- grav sphere and the other on the shoulder-plate of his Dead Boy armor, humped it two miles to the med station on his own, walking double-time the whole way.
The place was virtually empty. Coroner nowhere in sight, dispatch snoring at the radio, hung-over med tech puking his guts out in the john. The intake man was semi-conscious, cradling a jug of homemade whiskey in his fat hairy arms, singing incoherently. Powell walked right in with the body, unchallenged. Walked right into examination room one, did the paperwork himself. Left the receiving signature blank.
Unzipping the bag, he had an irresistible impulse: Forget these sloppy drunks, I'm doing this one.
He had neither the skills nor the legal authority to autopsy anyone, much less a murder victim, but he was observant and he was sober, two things that no one else in the building could claim. Until now, he'd worked administration-assigning schedules, calculating overtime, spell-checking logs and daybooks-while his officers, incompetent old-timer ex-Specters, lied and boozed, shirked fieldwork and ignored cases. He knew how they saw this: just another sack of flesh on the slab. Just another killing. Just another dead Burbs scumbag. Nothing special. Seen one, seen em all.
Powell looked down at the mangled body. He'd never handled homicide before. That was a Specter crime-not for Peacemaker investigation. But Powell had been in the Burbs long enough to know their drill: ask a few questions, break a few heads. Maybe railroad a psychic or d-bee sympathizer, get credit on their record for a solved case, a pat on the back, a nice cred bonus. In the end, they would achieve nothing. They would find no justice for the poor bastard on examination table 1. And Powell would still be working dispatch radio down in the Burbs.
No, he thought. This is my body. I can do this.
Hello miracle, hello ticket to Chi-Town.
He had at first been sickened. Now he felt drawn. Standing there, he couldn't take his eyes off it, off of the hills and valleys and little neighborhoods of exposed organs, the culs-de-sac of glistening cavities, the hidden monuments of yellowy gristle and bone. He wanted to explore it like a map of unknown territory.
And who cared if it was a psychic? Some people did. Powell certainly didn't.
This one was his. It had to be, had to be. He caught it, he'd finish it. Somehow he'd stay on the case, somehow. There had to be a way. The Inspector exams were coming up-he'd ace them, but he knew he needed something else, something more. He knew what he had to do. Make a case. Nail the perp. Be a hero. Get justice. Get promoted. Get the hell out of the Burbs.
Through the window and over the building-tops it was still dark enough to watch the predawn sky being carved up by blue-white searchlight beams on the gun turrets ringing the upper security halo of the city. In the Coalition med station, on the west side of the Burbs, the massive walled metropolis of Chi-Town would eclipse the sun when it rose.
Powell shut the door quietly. The lock pipped closed. The instrument drawer with its jumble of dangerous honed chrome was already unlocked. He turned on his personal recorder and began a preliminary autopsy.